If you have dismissed virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) because you believe server-side graphics sharing is a myth—like unicorns or measurable Windows Phone market share—Nvidia Corporation wants to introduce you to Grid 2.0.

Announced at VMworld 2015 in San Francisco, Grid 2.0 is the next generation of Nvidia's virtualized graphics technology, and you can get your hands on it today. And, no, this isn't about its streaming game technology of the same name.

If you're new to virtualized desktops, think of a virtualized desktop as an umbrella term that refers to a multitude of ways IT can run a workload, an app, or even an entire desktop on a server—but display it on a client device as though it were actually running there. The hiccup has always been masking a graphics experience that's been bottlenecked by the network; pumping graphics to a multitude of users across a 100Mbps or even 1Gbps shared local network pipe is much slower than zapping pixels from a graphics card to a display in the same system—especially when it's a few dozen users demanding video from the same struggling server. VDI employs a variety of technologies to streamline that graphics experience such that it can flit down a network pipe and users are none the wiser. Grid 2.0 is Nvidia's latest solution to this problem and it's impressive.

New Levels of Graphics-Intensive ApplicationsWith this version, Nvidia claims Grid 2.0 will deliver new levels of graphics-intensive applications to any device using virtualization—not just to VMware's vSphere but to other standards, too, from various companies including Microsoft and Citrix. To do this, Grid 2.0 is supposed to double performance from version 1.0 and increase user density to 128 users per Grid-enabled server. It's also been expanded to support Linux as a target operating system (OS) and can be run from blade server arrays in addition to larger rack boxes.

Using Grid 2.0, customers can virtualize applications and even entire desktop environments, and deliver them to different kinds of connected devices—especially thin clients and small-form-factor mobile devices. That means not only can an $85 thin client run a full Windows desktop with support for Aero and 3D graphics, theoretically an iPad could, too. At VMworld, Nvidia is showing off Grid's new muscle with a "Tower of Power."

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Despite its cringeworthy name, the Tower of Power's display is impressive. It's 16 feet tall, with all four sides displaying 336 micro-tiles grouped into 56 desk-sized displays—and not just displaying but occasionally showing advanced special effects cascading across the entire tile scape, including tornados, ripples, and I don't know what else. This was a truly impressive display considering the whole thing was being virtualized server-side.

Native ManagementIf you employ Grid as a support layer for a third-party, server-side VDI system (such as Microsoft RemoteFX), then it will seamlessly support those management tools, according to Nvidia. But Grid also comes with its own management toolkit that lets IT deploy and manage virtual desktops. Using those tools, they can establish user profiles to appropriately allocate server-side graphics resources and deliver the right level of performance to each user.

Nvidia announced partner support for Grid 2.0 from the likes of Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo, claiming those worthies will be offering Grid 2.0 on over 125 server models. You'll see an official release around September 15 but Nvidia also has a demo environment available using VMware vSphere 6.

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